If that's the case why has Craig continued to gain prominence and have more and more sway over BTC? Bitcion SV is worth $4B now. He's been able to monopolize the mindshare on Satoshi and misdirect the narrative.
Even if Blender can't match any of these point solutions at their respective niches, I have to imagine there would be a ton of value in a team that all mostly works in a common tool they all know well a pipeline of Maya, C4D, Modo, Nuke, Houdini, Zbrush, etc strung together.
I'm just starting to learn Houdini, but with the OpenVDB support in Blender it seems like the most elegant workflow for someone without existing experience is run simulations in Houdini and then just export the volumetric data to Blender and work with it there.
PUBG was itself a commercialized version of (arguably better) Arma 3 mods with a bunch of royalty free assets + microtransactions. It still was printing money and top of the Steam charts for many months- I think it ended up being a great outcome
Ex-Google was a meaningful distinction 15 years ago. Today it does not remotely entitle you to being funded.
Many VCs today recognize that Google is an extremely bureaucratic place that does not resemble a startup and I know more than a few who view Google experience as a negative signal.
The reality is that VCs are genuinely inclined to fund black founders since their funds are overwhelmingly old white men.
This is an industry that cares a lot about not generating controversy. VCs got hit hard by Me Too- Lightspeed, Kleiner, Binary, Sherpa, 500 Startups, and others all imploded or let people go due to allegations of sexism.
It's a Partner based business where, in general, they rarely hire a new senior Partner and cut them in on the carry.
Investing in black founders and hiring minority junior VCs ends up being the easiest way to brand themselves as racially equitable.
I'm in VC and there are many reasons why I and my peers are not interested in yet another software product selling to gyms. They are extremely fragmented, hard to access, low ACV customers who are already well served by products like MindBody. I've seen a ton of marketplaces for personal trainers as well.
The reality is that the chance a VC responds to a cold outbound email is already near 0. I get these in my LinkedIn inbox almost all the time and they are very rarely good because the founders with great companies are not going out of their way to cold email people. I doubt that most of the VCs she's talking about spent enough time to even realize it was a WoC.
I was a customer at one of their gyms and the app was garbage. It frequently crashed and there were huge bugs with basic stuff like the dates I'd be billed for renewal being wrong. I didn't realize I was still subscribed and they charged me ~$250 for a month where I didn't even go in.
The thing that really allowed DoorDash (and UberEats) to pull ahead was investing in partnerships with chain restaurants vs focusing on independent restaurants. Which hasn't necessarily resulted int he best product
Meal delivery doesn't just exist because people are lazy. It has been around a long time via the much more inefficient process of calling a restaurant that you already knew about, having someone spend time with you on the phone getting your order and credit card # and then dispatching a delivery person they employed directly to deliver the order to you.
CloudKitchens is more the kitchen infrastructure for restaurants who only have a presence on delivery apps. They are trying to facilitate a restaurant model that is optimized for the delivery apps'supply chains rather than starting their own
DoorDash already serves as the back end for a number of other services.
But being a courier company is not near as good of a business model. The aggregation element means that they own the end customer and payment flow, which among other things increases spend since you discover new restaurants via the platform and can transact seamlessly with any restaurant on DoorDash vs giving your card info to each new place
More importantly, as a two-sided marketplace DoorDash enjoys network effects which are the source of its defensibility. If they were just a courier company, restaurants could just switch over when they found the next company that could deliver marginally faster or undercut them with VC funding. As a two-sided marketplace, the restaurants can't turn them off without losing all the demand coming through the platform, demand which is captured by DoorDash is because they have tons of restaurants on the platform, creating a feedback loop.
I suppose you think Olga Tokarczuk or Svetlana Alexievich are more popular with millennials?
David Foster Wallace and Harold Bloom both have called Delillo one of the greatest living authors. I and quite a few other people I know in my age range (mid-20s) have enjoyed him without sensing his work is irrelevant to our demographic. Even his denser works like Underworld read like a 'pageturner' relative to his contemporaries like Pynchon or even Wallace. Let alone other writers in the canon like Dostoyevsky.
My criticism would honestly be that his writing is overly stylized and lacking in nuance. He inherits the hyperbolic, poetic quality of McCarthy but often applies it to the mundane and the result sometimes feels overwrought and overdramatized vs realistic. Zero K specifically felt like a fan fiction version of William Gibson's non sci-fi stuff like Zero History. And most of what he is trying to convey he just says outright in a 3rd person omniscient voice.
I actually think he is very culturally relevant and influential but I sense that if you were to evaluate his writing through the lens of academic comparative literature like the Nobel Prize committee (not the standard literature should be held to imo) it would fall short of most other laureats, Bob Dylan notwithstanding